I picked this book up on a whim. I was in the memoir/autobiography (what is the official difference?!) section and just picked it up and read the flap. I was intrigued and made an impulse buy. Wow. It is so hard for me to say what another person would think of this book because I just found it so moving subjectively. I feel like the writing must be good because I have certainly been known to get distracted from a good story if it is written badly. But really I just felt such a strong kinship with the main character and found the similarities between our lives striking.
Rachel Sontag grew up in a middle/upper class Jewish home with an extremely emotionally abusive father, a passive and potentially mentally ill mother, and a sister who found a way to disappear instead of bearing the brunt of her father’s cruelty. Rachel struggles to survive in this environment and becomes increasingly self aware of how she has been forced to cope and how these coping skills stop being effective outside the strange world that is her family.
While Rachel’s father is overtly emotionally abusive, telling Rachel that he wishes she was never born, that she is scum, etc., her mother at times acknowledges her father’s “sickness” (as they call it) and at times is entirely complicit in his abuse. When Rachel’s mother asks her, “What do you want from me?” Rachel thinks, “I wanted her. I wanted Mom to be someone she wasn’t, to take on a strength she never possessed, to do what I hoped I would have done in her situation. I thought that mothers were naturally inclined to protect their children, and she was failing. I thought she should have expected more from love, and I held her to my own standards of love, which were conceptual and formed merely in opposition to hers and had yet to be tested in the world.” Rachel’s mother repeatedly reminds her that “This is your family. No family is perfect.” And Rachel vacillates between a fierce love for her and a need to abandon her trust in her mother.
While Rachel is desperate to escape her home she is also trapped by thinking how difficult it would be to make it on her own. After a brief stint in foster care she decides she will make it through the next two years by shutting down and spending as much time away from home as possible. She makes it through those years and finally erupts into the world outside her home and into the realization of what those years have done to her. She discovers that she has yet to find what she is actually interested in and what she actually wants out of life after so many years trying desperately to anticipate her father’s next move and to protect herself from his abuse as best as she can.
Rachel spends some time after she leaves home trying to understand her father and have a different kind of relationship with him. In thinking about his past she writes, “When I look at photographs of Dad at his prom and on his bike and in the very first apartment he shared with Mom, I think maybe he was just too young. That Dad hadn’t finished growing up himself before I came along. That he didn’t know how to relate to children, so that when we demanded to be children he lost all sense of what to do. Maybe Dad had never seen me as a child, or maybe he had and wanted me to remain one forever. Or maybe it never sunk in that I was meant to become someone, that in the same way God had created man, not indentical to God but in God’s image, Dad had created me, so that I could create myself. I know that in raising us the way he did, Dad saw himself as a model for right. how badly he wanted us to arrive at our destination without straying too much from his path.”
Because her father continues to be abusive even in a long-distance relationship, Rachel eventually completely severs contact with him and concentrates on forging new relationships with her sister and mother. She has difficulty forgiving her mother, “Unlike her, Mom’s children would have a family. Even if that father was cruel. Even if that family was a skeletal facade of what a family was supposed to be in Mom’s imagination, a dream still caught in response to her own childhood. Mom didn’t protect us because we weren’t her priority. Although I disagreed with her decision, I could understand it, yet I couldn’t help but see it as a question of character. And the older I got the less I could excuse it…But the fact was she could have left and she didn’t.” Despite these realizations, Rachel works on accepting herself, her mother, and her sister for who they all are.
I was struck time and again by the similarities both in Rachel’s situation to mine and the similarities between our coping mechanisms and our work later in life to reflect on what made us the way we are. In the end this is a painful story of a family and the pain of leaving parts of that family behind to begin to form a life of your own making.
